God Gave Me Wings
by TheBlackParade
Summary: Summary: Tobias reflects on himself, his family, and what it means to be a living mistake.


Title: God Gave Me Wings

Summary: Tobias reflects on himself, his family, and what it means to be a living mistake.

Author's Note: Think of this as an adult Tobias' work, rather than the wannabe-novelist teenager we all know and love. The following is vaguely connected to 'A Very Long Time Ago' and additionally congruent with a longer story in progress called 'THE END' (which has a meaning behind the title, also).

When I was small, smaller than what you are now and much more so than you can hope to be again, I thought that God was going to make me an angel. It was a pretty notion I'd come across by way of library texts, sanctuary, and mistaken identity. As a child I was highly impressionable. Tucked in a corner of my mind is an image of a church ceiling bathed in the golden ripeness of a sunset and feathers… feathers not truly white but etched in shadow and every color imaginable. I wanted to fly with them away from my Aunt and her slave-driving life ethic to someplace colorful and warm. Someplace less like Maine and much more like Illinois. At the age of five I did not understand religion or scripture, nor my states and their climates. Just 'anywhere but here' and that the ceiling was the most beautiful example of humanity I had ever seen. I misunderstood that angels were humans who behaved well and were rewarded.

Even as I grew older and learned that just because I made believe or gilded something didn't make it true, I was in love with the sky. Oh, I loved my dinosaurs and knew every one of them by scientific name. And I could tell you anything about historical events you might care to know. But I knew the constellations at age seven and drew mankind with sets of wings. My hazel eyes were vast and unfocused for years as a boy; I was a dreamer. Always have been, and most likely always will be. That is what my chosen family relied on me for--- my sight. Not only my laser-like focus but the true vision behind my sockets. The one that saw the truth of a dying alien Prince and believed in what we were forced to surrender and battle. The soldier who always had something wry and optimistic to say in the bloody aftermath. For all my short-comings, I _saw_.

I told myself that God loved me when my Aunt would wend off into her long speeches about my no-good mother. As I cracked eggs into a glass bowl and held inside me four years of unshed tears, I dutifully repeated to myself that whatever kind of horrible person my mother had been… I was not. My existence was justified, though it never felt like it. It was not my doing that had made my mother go insane after my father's death, nor had I had any part in her dumping me on my deranged aunt and deadbeat uncle.

"…and look at you! Seven years old and still a scrawny kid with his head in the clouds. Wouldn't surprise me if you ended up just as crazy as my sister."

Crack, went the third egg. If I earned my keep through the constant work perhaps Auntie would allow me to attend school. And maybe, just maybe, I would have been halfway to earning my wings. But these thoughts began to ebb as my eighth birthday drew near. Storybooks can only sustain a child so long before he begins to question. Auntie hated me so much and I was terrified that it was, in fact, my fault.

Eight years old saw me living with my Uncle on the opposite coast. I was undecided as to whether I liked him any better than my Aunt for the two were at polarities. Reality became much chillier even in the hot California climate as the days wore on. This house was a poor excuse for a residence and smelt like vomit, alcohol, garbage and unwashed laundry. I nearly regurgitated the orange soda I had drunk on the plane as soon as I stepped foot in the door. Survival with my Uncle was an entirely different code (as I learned when he got clumsy with a two-by-four in the backyard). I lived constantly in my fantasy land of winged Saints and loving parents as I cleaned and nursed the drunken bastard. The stairs were Jacob's Ladder and my bedroom was Eden, and the kitten I found in an old McDonald's bag was my lion champion. Curiously, I chose to christen my kitten not 'Leonardo' or 'Alexander', but the little exclamation that meant 'all things cool' according to the surfers. 'Dude' and I discussed how to go about getting God's attention.

I was a horribly pathetic child. I freely admit that. It is a common ailment among those of us inclined to daydream. Bullies fed from my shy, awkward demeanor and victimized me ceaselessly through grade and middle school. In defense I retreated further into myself and began regularly checking my back for new nubs. I stared into the sky and cultivated the delusion that I had but to stretch my fingers to touch it. Still, I was alone and misplaced and on the ground. I began feeling more and more acutely as if I did not belong, somehow. Like an alien masquerading as a _homo sapien_. The one moment in which I truly felt significant was when my head was in a toilet and someone ordered the boys away. When my bleary eyes focused and found a concerned, serious visage before me, looking at me, I thought 'so this is what it feels like to be noticed'. He was asking me if I was alright, and assuring that they would not come back, but all I could think of was the inflection of his deep voice when he said 'Uh, sorry, but what's your name?'.

If my body was starved my soul was more so. Genuine kindness was like an allergy. I'd gotten a bit and now I needed more despite the fact that I was doing myself little good in seeking it. Saint Michael, the archangel, had sober brown eyes and dark hair and was in my English and Anatomy classes. I clung because I was reeling inside and so desperately grasping for acceptance. I carried my garden of Eden with me now and I was safe whenever Saint Michael was near. Really, his name was Jake Berenson and he allowed me to follow him only out of sympathy. Yet it was not so in my winged world. Jake was my first love, I might as well confess. The infection of his noble heart and kind eyes spread throughout my body until I was walking on clouds. Life had become a substantially more tolerable commodity, though I didn't fail to notice how Jake's best friend eyed me with distaste. I had fanciful notions that I kept ensnared inside my fingers and toes that Jake and I would be friends until we grew gray and his command would rub off on me. Nonsense, of course, but as with wings and prowess in battle I was certain my brain could make them come true.

I was gifted with the company of three others one night walking home. That same night brought the most imperative shift in my identity, hammering my foundations until I felt uprooted all over again. Aliens seemed perfectly natural in my disjointed veracity and I was without fear when Elfangor made his appearance. He was beautiful and tragic and the angel within me was yanking at its fetters. Here was a chance to _be_ without being anything specific. The power to fight, to change, to fly. I was drunk on possibility and hurting for this creature I had never met. Elfangor and I shared a bond before any of the other four had dared to approach him, as if our souls recognized one another. They did, for his blood was mine. Just a different color.

But humanity is all a state of perception, isn't it? I got my wings and then was punished for them. Tobias the boy was too big for his britches and too small for his heart. A bird cannot cry and so I never have. Trapped in the form of a red-tailed hawk and no longer the questing child, I felt as if someone had given me a swift slap across the face. Never a happy moment, foolish child, never ever. _Nothlit_ is the ultimate loneliness. A boy already feeling mislaid among his species was forced to become a less than sentient predator. Once I had given in to the animal and lost the will to be hand-fed like a pet it was years that I had my own little death every time I was forced to take life. I was a breathing example of the dangers we faced as warriors in this battle for our planet.

In the days after I accepted my role as an animal with the mind of a boy I came to learn what I am. Human? Hawk? Andalite? All at once? My feelings of being wrong and displaced were confirmed as reasonable. I was never meant to be. It is a strange sense of frailty one experiences when he is told that he was a cosmic mistake. I was a drop of ink on the paper and a sneeze in the choir. The Ellimist, who is similar to God but much less loving, warped and layered time so that a woman and an Andalite Prince would make a son that would someday be credited as one of Earth's saviors. But it was all a strange, curious accident that I exist at all. If it were not for the stretch of arm made by The Ellimist, Tobias Simmons would not have been possible. The Elimist stacked the deck against his enemy, the great and terrible Crayak. My father returned to his people, my birth and family were time-shifted, my mother was blinded and taken from me, and I was in precisely the right place at exactly the right time to become one of six that would be Earth's only resistance for three long years.

Someone once loved this mistake. I may never know why or how it came to be, it is one of those unfathomable emotional bonding that are inexplicable to the human mind. Perhaps because she wanted to care for me. Maybe because I was the only thing she could never have no matter how she clawed for it. When she died, so did my hope. I had fought tooth and nail for years to keep that love alive and it was gone, snuffed, by the one who I had trusted implicitly before I ever found Rachel. I screamed and then suffered in silence as I always had. The anger festered, grew to a fever, and abated into a resigned bitterness. A bitterness that would soon find a kindred spirit.

He kissed me in the ashes, like a fucking scene from some romantic tragedy. The acrid smell of wreckage was strangling bile up inside my throat and pieces of someone's body were lying just inches from my right arm. I couldn't think, or breathe, or understand. We kissed as if we were both dying (or maybe both amazed to be alive). As much as I wanted to hate the man that had volunteered the one who loved me to death, I felt beneath my ribs the twisted seething leech of truth that had been suckering my internal organs for three years. I loved her because I needed someone to love me. I loved him for understanding me. Fuck you, Jake Berenson. Damn you to hell… and take me with you.


End file.
